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So today i thought about how humans have developped in a very short manner. Here is what i came to think about:
Nomads:
The nomads only possessed what they could carry, and the livestock that they could handle. They had to work hard and walk many miles to get to the naturally enriched lands, because that’s how they survived. Food was not always available. Therefore they had not much time for research because they always had to move on.
Precious:
+ Show Spoiler +
Farmers:
Farmers worked hard but no longer had to walk miles to get to the naturally enriched lands. Instead they worked the land they had settled on and made the land work for them. That gave them time but with farming there suddenly also was a demand for construction and soon other demands aroused too
Precious:
+ Show Spoiler +
Citizens
With enough food available on a stable basis, cities could develop, and craftsmen sought to the cities where they found enough people to support their production and here they could sell their goods. And here I want to emphasize that the craftsmen could sell their stuff but it was not always that people could get what they wanted - not yet.
However this also meant that outsiders saw cities as places of high concentration of useful stuff. People sought to cities, some to work others to plunder. Thus there was a demand for protection.
Precious:
+ Show Spoiler +
Workers
With the introduction of new technologies like steam power the production rates skyrocket and stuff was always available to the people. It was no longer a question if the store had it – now the issue was could you pay it? Or had you worked enough to afford it? The people were no longer citizens but workers, and the reward was money. Now that you could get what you wanted with money, the new thing that was demanded was money.
Precious:
+ Show Spoiler +
Consumers:
The workers took it one step up the ranks when they all could afford to have cars and pay for the goods coming for lands far away. The internet provided easy access to stores around the world. Suddenly the whole earth was available for the one that had enough money. The people no longer had to move to get the goods they wanted. The goods came to them.
Note: Please note how different this is to the nomads. Thus the people where called the consumers and thus with no obstacles left they consumed earth.
Precious:
+ Show Spoiler +
 
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i often wonder what the next step is
also your thread title is bit redundant i think
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i think the next step must be some kind of a deevolution
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or maybe the cycle starts over at nomads but on an intergalactic scale as opposed to a planetary scale
maybe if technological and medical advances allow immortality it would probably change humans system of living in extremely profound ways
dunno..
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Didn't Winston Churchill say something like "I don't know what weapons will be used in WW3, but I know what weapons will be used after, sticks and stones"
WW3 sometime in the future, and cycle begins again from beginning.
Just my take.
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All significant human evolution occurred in your first step. Evolution beyond that, despite resistance to diseases, is very minor.
Humans will evolve towards the genes of those people that right now get the most children. There is barely any selection left on advantageous traits, which is good thing because selection means human suffering. But it is very bad for the human gene pool long term.
The most important thing right now is mixing of different ethnicities. Human genetic lines that split off and became separate a long time ago are being interwoven quite a bit.This is good because mixed ethnicity children have better genes. But in the long run there is nothing that is going to select for anything.
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damn this thread reeks of that bad movie book of eli.. hehehehe anyway very interesting read OP ^_^
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cultural, intellectual and technical evolution occurs at a rate of magnitude far beyond genetic evolution. This renders evolution on any significant scale redundant to humanity, since any selection trait is likely to be obsoleted technologically or culturally before it makes an impact enough to permanently influence the gene pool.
There is a small argument that lower class/lower society citzens tend towards having more offspring, but it is also true that these offspring are significantly less likely to survive to breeding age, and much of their position is cultural, not genetic, so that trend is, while existent, exceptionally minor.
What comes next? My guess would be an explorator phase, where since all humans have so many options at their disposal that society shifts towards comparative aesceticsm. We'll still want to get a lot of consumer goods, of course, but with more focus and control. Each person will then be able to dedicate more time to making their mark on the world through innovation, invention, excellence or dedication in a greater degree of more and more focused pursuits. Imagine a society of people with doctorates- only not in academic fields, necessarily, but in things like a specific style of mountain biking, knitting, cooking soups, indexing data, streamlining functions etc. Division of labour to a ridiculous extent, but on an intellectual level
After that, I think we'll hit a point where we have the second rennaisance, using digital and nanotech to further increase our mental technologies and increase the capability of our populations to master a broad skillset and level of understanding, reversing the trend of specialisation without lowering the levels reached. This will allow for metastudy to form more freely and again allow for another level of intelligence to be reached as a baseline.
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The way it is laid out, it looks like a concept for a video game. I don't see social evolution in quite the same way, but if you're going to super simplify something, I guess it will end up looking wrong no matter what.
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Norway28731 Posts
On November 21 2010 20:57 don_kyuhote wrote:
Didn't Winston Churchill say something like "I don't know what weapons will be used in WW3, but I know what weapons will be used after, sticks and stones"
WW3 sometime in the future, and cycle begins again from beginning.
Just my take.
it was einstein, the quote goes "I do not know with what weapons World War 3 will be fought, but World War 4 will be fought with sticks and stones." 
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I think they already fought ww3. It was the cold war. The superpowers somehow found a way to fight each other indirectly. All the beligerant action on the planet was connected and concerted, we just had no idea of what was happening.
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I have a pretty strong feeling we're headed for a global population crash in the next century. We're using up most of our non-renewable resources at an astonishing speed. We still haven't been able to find an adequate replacement for fossil fuels, and we're also running out of clean water and fertile soil. We lose more crops now to pests than we did before pesticides were introduced, and that continues to get worse as they get more and more resistant to new strains of pesticides.
Human "deevolution," or the lack of selection due to adequate food and modern medicine will probably be fixed by gene therapy, but I doubt that most of the world will have access to it when things go south. If not us, our kids are going to be in for a rough ride.
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its called homo metasapiens, and some of us are already there. i guess you could also call it übermensch.
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Well, you never know what's going to happen do you? Human conditions are everchanging. Our biology is not. If we live - and will live - longer than before, it is because of how well and how able we are to take care of ourselves and each other.
But, who knows, maybe we'll die of cancer? What will we do to stop that? Cure cancer. What will we do if we don't have food? Hunt for it. Humans will adapt to their present situation and try to find the best solutions for their presently perceived problems, or simply die as a species. We are, in that way, like animals, but empowered by our greater intellect, we can come up with brilliant ideas that better our chances of survival.
What is interesting, is our ability to shape the world around us to accomodate our present needs, thus setting into motion a cultural evolution, which is what the OP is talking about. And if our basic needs are met, we'll just make stuff up. Like for example: video games. If you remember a term from Civilization, this 'made-up-stuff' is called 'luxuries' and what we all want to have, if we want a hot girlfriend and be happy (I'm adressing a strictly heterosexual male audience here, but I'm actually only guessing that, that is the case).
The nice thing is, that anything can be a luxury, if there is a demand for it. That's why even nomads can get laid. They just need to have enough of that precious food stuff to throw around. Or whatnot. A camel, maybe?
Yeah, just my two cents^^.
(sorry for bad spelling, grammar etc. etc.)
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EPT
